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Gmail first.
Unnecessary step: I prepped Gmail, mostly by reviewing my labels and getting down to a set of 7-8 labels. I made sure all email only had 1 label. My thinking here was that I might consider using a desktop email client and wanted IMAP folders to make sense and not duplicate mail across folders. It turns out Fastmail support labels, but actually I still only put a single label on an email.
I then did the Fastmail import, and it setup the redirect to forward from Gmail to Fastmail. I configured my own domain name for the email, and I monitored the SPF and DKIM that Fastmail provided as DNS config for a couple of weeks (it was perfect). Basically this all works flawlessly and quickly.
I then started using Fastmail, just to see how it felt... left all the Gmail in place in case I changed my mind.
A couple of weeks later, I realised I was much happier on Fastmail. And started deleting absolutely everything from Gmail. That all went in the bin, and the 30-day automatic deletion has taken effect.
In Fastmail I've set up a label that is added to mail sent to my Gmail address... it's revealing to me which third party systems I need to update my email on or which friends I need to inform.
I'm not deleting my Gmail, because it's tied to Android, some app purchases, Nest, etc... but I am doing a slow and gradual thing to move people to a new email address.
Google calendar
I used Google Takeout to export multiple calendars as individual .ics files. I did this as I wanted to use the Fastmail import tool to keep some individual calendars but merge others. My calendars now roughly match my labels for mail, i.e.
shopping,finance,projects,work, with a defaulteventsone that is used when people invite me to things.Once imported I set up an Android app called DAVx5 and signed in using a Fastmail app specific password. This makes Fastmail apps available to the Google Calendar app. It works perfectly... so I then hid all of my Google Calendar calendars from the app, only showing the Fastmail ones.
When everything had settled, I've gone into Google Calendar and deleted whole calendars to nuke things.
Google drive
I have Google Drive installed locally on a Windows machine, it was set to "stream" files on demand. I changed that to replicate files locally so that I had everything.
I then search locally for files ending in
.gdoc.gsheetand.gslide. It turns out I really don't have many, about 50 files in 50GB of files. Most of my things in Google Drive are PDFs, and read-only files rather than things I edit.As I didn't have many of those and had never edited them on a mobile, I figured I merely need go into each file manually and export as MS Office format. I then installed LibreOffice on my machines, so I have a way to quickly work on those files. I didn't see any justification for purchasing MS Office given I obviously seldom create/edit files.
Having done that, my local Google Drive was a full copy of everything, and I just set up Syncthing and then cut and pasted the entire content into the folder for that.
I then waited a few weeks until I was comfortable, and have then deleted everything from Google Drive.
Velocio-
DAVx5
You might want to get ICSx5 as well, which makes subbing to ics calendars (not using webdav or similar) much easier.
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Ta.
Previously I'd got to ~ paragraph 3 and just couldn't shake the ease/integration of google stuff with my phone, etc. I use Calendar and shared Sheets a lot so it's more than email I guess.
Prior to that I'd plugged it into Thunderbird for an "offline" copy and subsequent to that I did a full export of my Google data so I had another copy but I dunno, there's limited hours in a day and this still seems a lot like work to me. I've still got another pi hole to build that I've not even looked at yet.
Thanks for taking the time to document. I may yet come back to this (for the 3rd time)
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Thanks for this, I need a bit of time to read over but looks very helpful.
I've started trialing Syncthing on your recommendation, so far so good. I'm a bit concerned about potential data loss as I've had a few conflicts initially, I guess using the trashbin version control would put my mind at ease here. Also I don't have the storage capacity on my phone so I guess the solution here is to setup my NAS then I can grab files from there if I'm in a fix, this doesn't happen very often.
Whilst researching this I'm came across Logseq. Wow, open source, markdown notes app. It's a bit tricky to start and not very intuitive but after a bit of time something has clicked with me, so I'm doing a little test syncing this across my devices.
NotThamesWater
hippy
fettled_nuts
I was thinking about this last night..
How did you do the migration? Just import everything into fastmail from gmail and then forward gmail to fastmail, gradually changing incoming stuff over to fastmail? Did you send out a big notice to everyone saying to email you on fastmail instead of gmail? Did you not enable forwarding and just run two mailboxes side by side until gmail stopped getting stuff?
Presumably you still have your gmail account(s) to access Drive or Sheets or whatever stuff on your phone or did you kill all that off too and use other apps?